The interpretation of ancient Greek literature : an inaugural lecture delivered before the University of Oxford January 27, 1909

7\

t^^f

THE INTERPRETATTpN

OF
s LITERA'

=10

iin

iOO

ifS AN INAUGURAL LECTURE

K )ELIVERED BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

JANUARY 27 1909

BY

GILBERT MURRAY

REGIUS PROFESSOR OF GREEK

OXFORD

AT THE CLARENDON PRESS

1909

Price One Shilling net

THE INTERPRETATION

OF ANCIENT GREEK

LITERATURE

AN INAUGURAL LECTURE
DELIVERED BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

JANUARY 27 1909

BY

GILBERT MURRAY

REGIUS PROFSSSOR OF GREEK

OXFORD

AT THE CLARENDON PRESS

1909

HENRY FROWDE, M.A.

PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

LONDON, EDINBURGH, NEW YORK

TORONTO AND MELBOURNE

i

THE INTERPRETATION OF
ANCIENT GREEK LITERATURE

Just nineteen years ago I was elected to the Pro-
fessorship of Greek in Glasgow University in succession
to Sir Richard Jebb ; and now I am appointed to the
Regius Professorship of the same subject in Oxford
in succession to Dr. Ingram Bywater. Probably few
men have ever entered upon the work of those two
Chairs without some misgiving, some searching sus-
picion of the general adequacy of their armour; and
in my case all such feelings are deepened when I think
of the two great figures in learning and scholarship
whom it has been my lot to follow. Jebb was, I presume,
the most famous Greek scholar in England: his sure
touch, his * safeness ', his delicate sense of language and
of literary taste, above all his extraordinary power of
patient and luminous exposition, made him in the eyes
of most cultivated Englishmen the typical represen-
tative of Greek scholarship. Of Professor Bywater it is
harder to speak ; for to say anything of him here is like
praising him to his face. That fine edge of intellect,
that urbane and weighty culture of his, are better known
to many of my hearers than they were to me ; but I
should like on this occasion to record the one special
impression which I always received from him. It was
an impression of great unsounded depths. The severe
reticence which was forced upon his books by the
accident of their form seemed symbolic of something

4 THE INTERPRETATION OF

in his own nature. It was as though one might quarry
in him for thought and knowledge with assurance
of always finding more, as so many of us have quarried
in his edition of HeracHtus. One could quarry even in
those small texts of Aristotle. There was no display
anywhere, there seemed little that called for notice.
Then your eye was caught by something in the foot-
notes. A well-known emendation, confidently attributed
in current books to some recent editor, had here attached
to it a name belonging to the sixteenth or seventeenth
century. What we thought was new was really three
or four hundred years old. Most of us would barely
remember the name of the real author of the emendation ;
but Bjrwater would have read him, and learned from
him. You went on reading the text, and it would
perhaps occur to you that some passage was not so
hard as you had remembered it, or that the meaning
was slightly different and clearer. You looked close,
and found that the punctuation had been altered. And
behind these slight and silent changes you realized the
hours of close and acute thinking, the years of profound
and unerring study.

Gentlemen, I am not going to dilate upon the diffi-
culties and misgivings which I feel in taking up the
responsibilities of this great historic Chair, the Chair of
By water, of Jowett, and of Gaisford. I have much that
I could say on the subject, but it is better unsaid;
especially because, when a man begins to speak of his
own defects, his hearers are apt to find that several of
the most obvious have escaped his notice. But it is
natural on an occasion like this that a new Professor
should say something about the work which he has
taken up and the particular ways in which he proposes

ANCIENT GREEK LITERATURE 5

to set about it. If this were a new University, or if
Greek were what it was at the Renaissance, a new and
unexplored subject, there would be all sorts of sugges-
tions and prospects of interest to lay before you. But
in a University of vast traditions, of long-tried efficiency
and fame, the first thing that a new Professor should
think of is not to change something in Oxford, but to do
his best to be worthy of Oxford. And something similar
holds of the subject. True, research is a necessity to
understanding : and no study that is really flourishing
can help both seeking and finding new things ; true,
also, that we have Crete and the Papyri before our eyes.
Yet, on the whole, the main work of a Greek scholar is
not to make discoveries or to devise new methods, but
merely to master as best he can, and to re-order ac-
cording to the powers of his own understanding, a vast
mass of thought and feeling and knowledge already
existing, implicit or explicit, in the minds or the pub-
lished works of his teachers.

The few special projects that occur to me amount to
little, but may well be mentioned here. In the first
place, it has struck me that in Oxford a young scholar
who has just received his degree and perhaps his Fellow-
ship, and who wishes to pursue his classical studies
deeper, often suffers from a certain lack of guidance.
I felt it myself; and I have noticed good effects from the
Scotch system, in which a clever assistant sometimes
learns a good deal as to method and the use of his books
from close association with his Professor. Similarly, I
have heard many men here speak with enthusiasm of the
good they got from their evenings at the Aristotelian
Society, with the constant presence and direction of
Professor Bywater. He has most adequate successors in
that work. And for my own part, among the great Aristo-

6 THE INTERPRETATION OF

telians of this University I should be only a trembling
learner and not a guide. The plan which I should like
to attempt, if opportunity offers, is this : To form a class
or society, something in the nature of a seminar, but
less formal, which should collectively study and eventu-
ally edit some small and interesting pieces of ancient
Greek hterature. Some members should undertake to
collate the MSS. or a certain number of them; others
would take the linguistic forms, and, if the book is in
verse, the metre ; others the history or the speculative
thought involved; all should of course work carefully
at understanding every word of the text. If special
questions arose which seemed out of our range in the
class, we could, I feel sure, depend upon the kindness
of a specialist in those questions to come in for an
evening and advise us. The selection of the book to
work upon will be difficult. It should be a small
book, so that not too many generations should pass
away before any result of our work is visible. It
should present a large number of different problems
to be worked at; and naturally it ought to be some-
thing outside the immediate range of our regular
curriculum. Possibly the long fragment of Her-
mesianax, leading, as it would, to other Alexandrian
fragments, might be enough to begin upon: it is full
of questions of form, of mythology, of the development
of literature. Or, if that hundred-line fragment is not
solid enough, even for a beginning, there is a great deal
to be done with the fragments of Tragedy, a great deal
with some of the antiquarian Treatises of Plutarch. For
my own part I should much Hke to attack the little-
known and extraordinarily interesting work of Sallustius,
Trepi 6e5>v koX koctixov. That little book cries out for a con-
venient edition with translation and commentary; and

ANCIENT GREEK LITERATURE 7

if, in many of the problems of Neo-Platonic philosophy,
I should be to my class at best a one-eyed man leading
the blind, there are those in Oxford who could, and I am
sure would, from time to time be willing to guide us.

That is one project which I think may possibly
prove practicable and worth carrying out.

There is also another matter. I think that those of
us whose work lies in the province of ancient language
and literature, especially in ancient poetry, often feel
with regret that the sharp division made by our examina-
tion system between Moderations and the Final School
of Litterae Humaniores tends somewhat to disintegrate
the unity of Hellenic studies. The Greats School forms
a course of work at once so arduous and so admirable in
its educational value that men are absorbed in it. They
feel that they have left language and poetry behind
them at Moderations, and that there is little serious
to study in the Classics except specialized History and
specialized Philosophy. I say this not in a spirit of
blame. It is the natural result of an effective and highly
strung educational system. But I think that, with a view
to maintaining the unity of our subject and using each
part of it to illustrate the rest, two small experiments
might be made. In the first place, we might have in the
Summer Term a course of some seven or eight lectures,
of as wide a scope as possible, for men who have just
taken Moderations and are beginning to read for Greats.
I conceive of the lectures as given by different men of
special knowledge in particular branches of Archaeology,
Literature, Anthropology, and the like : lectures on in-
scriptions and their use for history, on coins, on the
principles of Greek religion, on the position in the
development of Greek literature occupied by certain
great historians and philosophers. I think such a course

8 THE INTERPRETATION OF

would in many cases broaden the outlook of a good
student, and give him some useful clues in his difficult
first approaches to the subject-matter of the four great
prose writers. And I am happy to say that Professor
Gardner and other authorities to whom I have applied
have responded to my invitation most cordially.

In the second place, by a little specialization, some-
thing may be done to encourage an interest in the less
well known parts of Greek literature. We classical
scholars tend — as critics often tell us — all to have read
the same set of authors and all equally to feel less at
home when we are asked to move beyond that circle.
I believe myself that that is quite as it should be. The
essential postulate of classical study is that some books
and some ages are much more instructive than others,
and we naturally tend to study the best that we know.
But, however right in the main, this tendency has an
element of weakness in it. Fortunately, it is a weak-
ness easy to overcome in a University so rich in classical
students as Oxford. I have invited various classical
lecturers to choose each some quite small and definite
portion of the less known literature and give us some
public account of it. The plan is that each man should
prepare his subject and deliver upon it one public
lecture in a finished form, and then be ready to give
advice and to answer questions. Questions might come
from students who wished from mere general interest to
follow the lecture up, or possibly from candidates for
the Baccalaureate of Letters or Greats men taking
a special subject in Language and Literature. I have
applied in the first place, as was natural, merely to men
whom I happened to know, and whom I knew to be
interested in some portion of Greek literature lying
a little off the beaten track. But I shall be most grateful

ANCIENT GREEK LITERATURE 9

to others who will volunteer for lectures in future
courses. Those to whom I have applied have, I am
happy to say, taken up the idea with interest. I hope
that the first course may be given next October Term.

I have thought it worth while to mention these pro-
jects, both from a wish to use the earliest opportunity
for taking other classical teachers into my confidence in
the matter, and also in the hope that I may receive as
early as possible some helpful criticisms or suggestions.

But of course such plans amount to little. They
make, even if successfully carried out, only a current
this way or that upon the surface of our studies. We
English scholars have a great tradition behind us, and
our main task is to keep that tradition intact, to know
Greek as Elmsley and Porson knew it. Of course
there were things known to them which we shall never
learn ; and equally there are things familiar and full
of illumination to us which they never dreamed of.
A tradition can only keep alive by constantly growing.
But there is one great characteristic of the scholarship
of Oxford and Cambridge which at the present day
we should take care not to forget. If my memory does
not deceive me, it was once described by the late
Provost of Oriel. He pointed out that the English
Universities, while they had not the great antiquity
of Bologna and Montpellier, while they had not the
enormous productiveness and professional finish of
Berlin or Leipzig, had performed one remarkable and
perhaps unique task ; they had made the great Greek
writers an integral element in our highest national
culture, so that Homer and Sophocles and Plato were
living forces continually working upon English thought,
almost as our own Shakespeare and Bacon and Milton

B

10 THE INTERPRETATION OF

are. I believe that this is true ; and that in some cases
— in the case of Plato, for instance— a large part of an
influence particularly strong at the present day is
definitely due to the Oxford Greats School. I would
go further. If you take English political thought and
action from Pitt and Fox onwards, it seems to me that
you find always present, even in its times of reaction,
when repressive and authoritarian tendencies are
strongest, certain mitigating and hopeful strands of
feeling which are due — of course among many other
causes — to this permeation of Greek influence: an
unquestioning respect for freedom of life and of
thought, a mistrust of passion and a confidence in
SophrosynSj a sure consciousness that the poor are
the fellow citizens of the rich, and that statesmen must
as a matter of course consider the welfare of the whole
state.

This permeating influence has not to any very large
extent been brought about by conscious popularizing.
It has been due to the existence in the two old Uni-
versities of a large body of able men devoting much
time and thought to first understanding and then helping
their pupils to understand the thoughts of the great
Greek writers.

The task of understanding has in many ways changed.
Notably the amount to be understood has increased
upon us enormously. The range of what is meant by
Greek is vastly wider than in Porson or Elmsley's day,
notably wider even than when I was an undergraduate.
Elmsley was Professor of Ancient History in this
University. But how greatly out of his depth he would
have felt if he were plunged without preparation into
one of our present advanced courses of Greek History !
It is not merely that he would have had to re-write his

ANCIENT GREEK LITERATURE ii

notebooks so as to take in Schliemann and Dr. Evans
and the 'Adr^vaiiov rioAtreta. Many of the actual methods
would be strange to him: the use of economics and
sociology, the use of Semitic and Egyptian records, the
analysis of ancient documents which we have chiefly
learnt from Semitic scholars, and all the various means
which lie at the disposal of a historian like, let us say,
Eduard Meyer. Elmsley used inscriptions both for
linguistic and historical purposes ; he had even copied
some down in situ. But imagine him faced with Ditten-
berger's Sylloge, and that mass of ordered knowledge
drawn from vast stores of which perhaps only one
contemporary of Elmsley's had so much as suspected
the existence. He used etymological arguments ; he
had probably read Sir William Jones, and he may have
read Bopp. Yet how he would have been overwhelmed
by Brugmann and that whole huge and growing science
of Comparative Philology! He did not, as far as I
remember his work, show any suspicion of the exis-
tence of such a subject as Comparative Religion or
Comparative Mythology ; he would come quite unpre-
pared upon Tylor^s Primitive Culture and Frazer's
PausaniaSy or even upon Roscher's Lexicon. He would
feel himself surrounded on all sides by monsters like
that of Frankenstein, which classical students had called
into being to their own confusion. Even his com-
positions in Greek would not stand comparison with,
say, Dr. Headlamps. Nay, in his own special region,
the niceties of Attic form, he would find the results
which he attained by keen observation and brilliant
insight superseded by Meisterhans's collection of in-
stances from the stones.

This last case suggests an obvious reflection. If the
field of Greek study has increased so greatly, so also

12 THE INTERPRETATION OF

have our aids to knowledge. We do understand, or
at least each one of us has a chance to understand, the
wonderful life and literature which form our study
better than our fathers did. Let any one who knows
Lobeck's Aglaophamvis imagine what Lobeck would
make of that subject if he were writing now. Think of
the masses of dead unillumined matter through which
Lobeck, with his minute carefulness, his massive
erudition, laboured steadily and almost ironical^,
reaching at last little more than a negative result. And
think of the light and the vitality that can be infused
into that matter now by our leading students of Greek
Religion.

Greek Religion is a special and a new subject. But
I feel this improvement in our understanding nowhere
more clearly or with more certainty than in what seems
at first sight an old one, the general appreciation of
literature. In my rather prolonged work on the text
of Euripides I have been] always learning from three
men, Porson and Elmsley and Hermann. Now Her-
mann himself— the greatest man of the three — said of
Porson, in a moment of irritation, that when once a
passage would scan and construe, Porson asked no
further questions about it. That charge could not be
retorted upon Hermann. It could not be made against
Elmsley; even less against Jeremy Markland, who said
at the end of his life that he was not sure that there
was one ode of Horace which he fully understood.
Yet, if you turn to the general criticisms of various
plays occasionally uttered by Elmsley or Markland or
even Hermann, the effect is strange. In spite of their
wide and exact knowledge of Greek letters, in spite of
the visible joy which they took in their work, one feels
their criticisms to be more than inadequate, to be

ANCIENT GREEK LITERATURE 13

almost childish, in comparison with the average com-
petent work of the last thirty years. As a matter of
fact the language of criticism had hardly been invented
in their day. And if you turn from Elmsley to the
really brilliant achievements of modern literary criticism
— say to Dr. Verrall's analysis of the end of the Choe-
phoroBy or the scene with the Phrygian in the Orestes —
you feel that the thing itself had hardly been invented.
The modern writer sees ten things where Elmsley saw
one, and that not the most vital one.

This result is satisfactory. If a study does not
advance it is sure to be falling back. True, we have
need to take great care that amid the wide additions to
our knowledge that come from Archaeology, History,
Philosophy, Comparative Anthropology, and the hke, we
do not lose our close grip of the minutiae of the language
which formed the great boast of the old English school ;
still more that in the reading of learned periodicals and
modern books about the Greek writers, we do not
forget to read the Greek writers themselves ; for with-
out the foundation of a clean and definite understanding
of the language and a real knowledge of the books no
superstructure can be sure : still, we can on the whole
go on our way in confidence, feeling that we are not
falling below our standard, not lessening the patrimony
we have inherited.

But this widening of the borders of Greek study
somewhat alters the position and the definite duties of
a Professor of Greek. When I look about me in
Oxford I am conscious that, in almost every one of the
great branches into which the knowledge of ancient
Greece may be divided, I am in the presence of men
whose knowledge and judgement is superior to mine.
In Philosophy, in History, in the various forms of

14 THE INTERPRETATION OF

Archaeology, in Philology and Palaeography, there are
men to whose knowledge mine is but the groping of
an amateur; yet all these subjects are necessary and
essential parts of the proper study of Greek. It seems
indeed that the subject of Greek literature, especially
the poetical side of it, and of language in so far as it
expresses literature, are the subjects that are chiefly
set aside for the professor. But of all subjects these
are perhaps the least able to stand alone. The business
of an interpreter of Greek literature is to understand
the full meaning of words uttered and written by
great men, dead more than two thousand years ago.
The palaeographer and the grammarian must help us
to get the words right. And when we have got them
their meaning will depend upon all kinds of other
questions : the daily lives those men lived, the houses
and cities they dwelt in, the historical changes through
which they passed, above all on the beliefs and ideas
which they received unconsciously from tradition or
built up by the labour of their own brains. The
Professor of Greek, it is evident, must depend at every
turn upon the discoveries or the special knowledge of
other workers in the wide field of Hellenic study. All
Hellenists must needs work together at the large task
that our generation has laid upon us.

For we may fairly ask ourselves — nay, we must, if we
have read our Plato with due profit, from time to time
ask ourselves — what our business is and what good we
are in the world, we historians and antiquarians and
ypa/x/xariKot, we laborious students of a far distant litera-
ture and art and thought. Doubtless each man's
answer to that question will be slightly different. Yet
it seems that in some way or other we are wanted.
It seems that Humanity, in the vast and chequered

ANCIENT GREEK LITERATURE 15

journey on which it labours from a dimly descried
beginning to an unsurmised goal, is unwilling to lose
the lessons of its experience, or the mere charm of its
memories; and, above all, in the ordinary slough of
living and in the trough of the wave, wishes to keep as
far as may be still vivid and undying the highest
moments of its past life. Strip the past naked of all
false sentiment and strained idealism, admit to the full
the failures of Hellenic civilization and the infection of
primitive savagery from which it strove so hard but so
vainly to get free : there can remain no doubt whatever
that the best life of Greece represents one of those
highest moments. The business to which the world
has set us Greek scholars is to see that it does not die.

Among the elements that contribute to the higher
evolution of human life, it looks as if one might make
a broad division : some are progressive, so that each
new stage supersedes the last, some are eternal and are
never superseded. I will not try to specify the two
classes more precisely; one might say roughly that
material things are superseded and spiritual things not ;
or that everything considered as an achievement can
be superseded, but considered as so much life, not.
Neither classification is exact, but let it pass. Our own
generation is perhaps unusually conscious of the element
of change. We live, since the opening of the great
epoch of scientific invention in the nineteenth century,
in a world utterly transformed from any that existed
before. Yet we know that behind all changes the
main web of fife is permanent. The joy of an Egyptian
child of the First Dynasty in a clay doll was every bit as
keen as the joy of a child now in a number of vastly
better dolls. Her grief was as great when it was taken
away. Those are very simple emotions, but I believe

i6 THE INTERPRETATION OF

the same holds of emotions much more complex. The
joy and grief of the artist in his art, of the strong man in
his fighting, of the seeker after knowledge or righteous-
ness in his many wanderings; these and things like
them, all the great terrors and desires and beauties,
belong somewhere to the permanent stuff of which daily
life consists ; they go with hunger and thirst and love
and the facing of death. And these it is that make the
permanence of literature. There are many elements in
the work of Homer or Aeschylus which are obsolete
and even worthless, but there is no surpassing their
essential poetry. It is there, a permanent power which
we can feel or fail to feel, and if we fail the world is the
poorer. And the same is true, though a httle less easy
to see, of the essential work of the historian or the
philosopher.

I remember about twenty years ago reading an
obituary notice of Bohn, the editor of the library of
translations, written by Mr. Labouchere. The writer
attributed to Bohn the signal service to mankind of
having finally shown up the Classics. As long as the
Classics remained a sealed book to him, the ordinary
man could be imposed upon. He could be induced
to believe in their extraordinary merits. But when,
thanks to Mr. Bohn, they all lay before him in plain
English prose, he could estimate them at their proper
worth and be rid for ever of a great incubus. Take
Bohn's translation of the Agamemnon, as we may pre-
sume it appeared to Mr. Labouchere, and take the
Agamemnon itself as it is to one of us : there is a broad
gulf, and the bridging of that gulf is the chief part of our
duty as interpreters. We have of course another duty
as well — our duty as students to know more and im-
prove our own understanding. But as interpreters, as

ANCIENT GREEK LITERATURE 17

teachers, our main work is to keep a bridge perpetually
up across this gulf. On the one side of it is Aeschylus
as Bohn revealed him to Mr. Labouchere, Plato as he
appeared to John Bright, Homer as he still appears to
Mr. Carnegie ; I will go much further and take one
who is not only a man of genius, like Bright, but a great
poet and a Greek scholar, Euripides as he appears to
Mr. Swinburne; on the other side is the Aeschylus,
the Plato, the Homer, the Euripides, which we, at
the end of much study, have at last seen and realized,
and which we know to be among the highest influences
in our lives. This is not a matter of opinion or argu-
ment. What we have felt we have felt. It is a question
of our power to make others, not specialists like us, feel
the same. It is no impossible task. Like most others,
it is one in which a man sometimes succeeds and some-
times fails, and in which he reaches various degrees
of comparative success. There is not a classical tutor
in this room who does not know that it can be done, and
that he can himself do it.

Yet it is sometimes surprising to me that we should
succeed at all, considering what obstacles of age and
language and atmosphere we have to cross, and
what a difficult thing interpretation is, even when there
are, comparatively speaking, no obstacles. I wonder
how much of the meaning of contemporary books in our
own language really gets into our minds at first reading.
Of course the amount varies widely. Some books may
be entirely composed of familiar ideas; some readers
may be particularly intelligent. But I suspect that
most writers would receive something of a shock
if they realized how small a proportion of what they
write usually gets through into their readers' minds.
Certainly young examiners do, when they look over

c

i8 THE INTERPRETATION OF

their first papers and find what they are supposed to
have said in their lectures. Certainly poets and play-
wrights do, whenever they see their works acted without
much previous supervision by themselves. And remem-
ber, both the examinee and the actor are well above the
average both in intelligence and training, and both have
taken quite special pains to understand. In other cases
readers are not subjected to any similar test, and writers
write on without any such rude awakening. But these
two instances are enough to make us pause before
thinking that it is a simple matter to understand and
interpret even a book in our own language and belonging
to our own civilization, not to speak of one removed
from us by great gulfs.

And yet, as I said, we do it. It is a question, I
suppose, of caring and of taking pains. I am often
struck, when I read controversial literature about Homer,
say, or Plato, to notice how comparatively small a part
of the field the controversy covers. If you take the
whole of what Plato or Homer means to one of the
disputants, and the whole of what he means to the other,
nine-tenths of the two wholes coincide. And they often
coincide in the most important and essential things,
those which are felt and do not particularly claim to be
talked about. In the language of the stage, the great
things 'carry' — across the footlights, and across the
ages.

It is a strange fact, this carrying power of a thing
so frail as poetry, or of that creative effort in philosophic
thought which is of the same stuff as poetry, kvpa,
'TiovTia^ avpaj ' Wind, wind of the deep sea,' begins a
chorus in the Hecuba, and fifty others could be chosen
like it. How slight the words are ! Yet there is in them
just that inexplicable beauty, that quick shiver of joy or

ANCIENT GREEK LITERATURE 19

longing which, as it was fresh then in a world whose
very bone and iron have long since passed into dust, is
fresh still and alive still ; only harder to reach ; more
easy to forget, to disregard, to smother with irrelevan-
cies ; far more in danger of death. For, like certain
other of the things of the spirit, it will die if it is not
loved.

One cardinal fact about great poetry, as about great
philosophy, the very secret, perhaps, of what is called
their immortality, is that their main value lies in a
process, not in a result. A table of the results reached
in Plato's Republic would scarcely even be interesting.
The essence of the Republic would be gone. The
essence of the Republic can only be reached by the
long process of thinking it all through — never quite
as the author thought it, of course — that is beyond us —
but with some real effort to re-think the thoughts as if
they were our own. It is what Lewis Nettleship and
our other great Plato teachers in Oxford have habitually
tried to make us do. And in just the same way with
poetry, and most of all with drama. We do not under-
stand a great poem till we have felt it through, and as
far as possible re-created in ourselves the emotions which
it originally carried. This is not a light task. But we
must do our best.

As was said in this room last year by the great
leader of contemporary Greek scholars. Professor von
Wilamowitz-Moellendorff: *We all know that ghosts
will not speak until they have drunk blood : and we must
give them the blood of our hearts.' To do this is the
great sacrifice and the great privilege of a scholar's life.
It is for this that we are content to become what we are,
a somewhat bloodless company, sensitive, low-spirited,
lacking in spring ; in business ill at ease, in social life

20 THE INTERPRETATION OF

thin and embarrassed, objects of solicitude to kind
hostesses. We have, more than most people, the joy of
having given ourselves up to something greater than
ourselves. We stand between the living and the dead.
We are mediators through whom the power of great
men over their kind may still live after death ; through
whom the living may catch the tones of more august
voices than are now to be heard upon the earth. ' More
august ? ' Perhaps that is our illusion, though it is diffi-
cult to imagine any contemporary of our own who
should be ' august ' quite as Aeschylus is. But at least
different in kind and very noble.

And for us personally it is surely something that our
work is cast in such an exquisite material. For a large
part of our working life, even if we are only arranging
an apparatus criticus, collecting grammatical instances,
even looking over exercises and examination papers, the
actual subject-matter which we handle, the bricks and
mortar out of which we build, are the words and thoughts
of these great men of the past. Damaged and one-sided
we doubtless are. Most professions damage a man in
some way. But if one must suffer some injury, it is
not so bad an injury to have one's mind filled a little
too full of the thoughts of Euripides or Vergil or Isaiah.

In conclusion, if I may sum up these general remarks
about our work as interpreters of Greek, three main
points seem to emerge. In order to understand Greek
literature, let us keep our knowledge broad of base and
our minds receptive. A true Hellenist may no doubt
have his special subject ; in the present state of know-
ledge he practically must ; yet he should at the same
time be able to say, Graeci nihil a me alienum ptito.
The time has long passed when the grammarian could

ANCIENT GREEK LITERATURE 21

afford to turn deaf ears to the archaeologist, or the
historian to despise the palaeographer. Or, rather, no
such time ever existed.

In the second place, let us realize in dealing with
Greek literature, as with every other, that in order to
understand we must also feel. In early Greek, after all,
the two ideas are expressed by the same word.

I am not here pleading for any mere enthusiasm or
Schwdrmereiy any enticing theory of short cuts by which
you can reach 'the spirit' of an ancient writer while
neglecting 'the letter'. The letter is the road to the
spirit, and it is only through the exactitudes of the letter
that the spirit can be made visible. It is not less hard
work that I am asking for : I almost fear it is more.
But I would say emphatically of Greek literature, what
I heard Professor Andrew Bradley say in this room of
Shakespeare : that the source of more than half our
mistakes and our failures in understanding is the habit
of reading with a slack imagination. With a slack
imagination no great poetry, no great philosophy, no
movement of history, can ever be understood. The
difficulty is that at first reading it is often impossible to
use the imagination effectively, at least in the right way,
because you do not yet know what the right way is.
And repeated reading, with its accompaniments of note-
making and intellectual analysis, tends with many people
to dull the edge of imagination. With a true scholar
that is just what it must not do.

And lastly, however unworthy we ourselves may be,
let us not despise our calling. It is not to be made
light of because it produces no great discoveries or
inventions, no stir and change upon the face of the
world. It is at least keeping alive things of great value
which otherwise would quickly die, and also to some

22 THE INTERPRETATION OF

extent maintaining the standard of sensitiveness by
which such value can be judged.

AHke in philosophy and poetry, alike, I believe, in all
art and literature and history, the profession of a
scholar ought to imply in him who makes it a certain
special faculty of appreciation and enjoyment, a power
of apprehending a long scale of differences. Do we
feel clearly, without hesitation and without any regard
to external authority, that the Antigone or the Republic^
the De Rerum Natura or Macbeth, is a thing greater
than the last good poem or play or book of philosophy ?
Do we unfeignedly take more joy in them, and can we
go on learning from them more and more ? If not, let
us take to some other business, not that of a scholar.
I say this not in any spirit of depreciation towards the
present, nor any wish to glorify the past as past. To
be deaf to the speech of his own time is no achievement
in a scholar ; it is merely a failure of brain, a death in
life, like another. Age and country are indifferent ; it
is goodness of quality that matters.

Only on one hypothesis, as far as I can see, will our
profession really stand condemned. Some popular
psychologists pretend that the healthy human being is
always and everywhere much the same ; that it is mere
illusion to believe in saints or men of genius or villains,
or in the outstanding value of one age over other ages.
If that is true, our calling will no doubt be futile ; for
the labour that we spend in understanding our remote
subjects of study will be quite disproportionate to the
result. But if such a view is quite false, if the truth is
that in the long course of human evolution life has
alternately flowed and stagnated, risen and sunk and
eddied like a great river, casting up on its waves, now
here, now there, in this age and in that, men and deeds

ANCIENT GREEK LITERATURE 23

of men, growths of beauty and of wisdom, heroisms and
virtues, of all variations and degrees of value, so that
some stand out as high beyond our powers of measure-
ment, superlative or extraordinary in their kind ; then
it is worth while for us students in our various branches
to devote our lives to the study and preservation of
these greatest things ; it is worth the world's while to
set apart in each generation a certain number of us — not
very many after all — to work as best we can upon them,
to understand and to interpret.

OXFORD

PRINTED AT THE CLARENDON PRESS

BY HORACE HART, M.A.

PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY